The Spyglass Tree (22 page)

So I took over while she went back up the stairs to the entrance hallway to answer it, and I saw the gashes and knots and puffs on his head and face and the bruises on his arms and torso, and every time he had to make any movement he grunted, and when he was not gasping from sudden stabs of sharp pain he was sighing and mumbling to himself, saying mostly the same thing over and over, answering his own questions as if the right words would undo what had happened. Unh unh unh, just look at all this now. Just look at it. You ever seen anything like this in your life? I know good and well I ain’t never seen nothing like this in all of my born days. I swear to God. All of this and what did I do? I ain’t done nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody.

When she came back, she led him out to the couch near the small crescent-shaped bar in the party room where, along with an upright piano, a regular professional rockola, and a console radio, there as also a stack of folded bridge tables and chairs, a big round poker table, and a pool table.

That was him, she said. He’s on his way but there’s something else he’s got to attend to first, and Will Spradley said, I got to see him because I got to tell him, because God knows I wasn’t trying to get him in no trouble like this, and she said, Take it easy, Will, we know that; and Will Spradley said, All I was doing was what I was supposed to do and I just happened to run into Gile and that’s what I told Dud Philpot and that’s all I told him because I wasn’t trying to get nobody in no trouble. That’s how come I come on out here. Because I didn’t want nobody to see me going back out to the Pit, and she said, He knows that, Will. She said, I called him as soon as you made it out here.

All I was trying to do was what I was supposed to be doing and now look at all this, Will Spradley said. I declare before God, he moaned, touching his back and sides with his swollen left hand
and pressing the cold damp folded face towels to his mouth and nose as I passed them to him while she went on trying to patch up his gashes and bruises using the Mercurochrome for some, Band-Aids for others, and gauze bandages for the larger ones.

Man, just look at you, she said, so just tell me one thing. How in the hell did you go and get yourself all tied up with some old poor white trash bloodsucker like Dud Philpot in the first goddamn place? You got to know better than that, Will Spradley, and he said, I don’t know, Boss Lady. I just don’t know, and she said, You hear this stuff, Schoolboy. As for myself, I still haven’t been able to figure out how some of our people live to get to be as old as they do. It’s a goddamn mystery to me how they don’t poison themselves to death through just plain old dumbness.

Wait a minute, just a minute, just a minute, she said then and went over to a closet and came back and said, Here, help him into this, and handed me a faded blue-and-gray plaid sport shirt and put an old worn golf jacket on the chair by the couch. The shirt was size forty-two. Will Spradley was about size forty, but he was just about six feet even, and he must have weighed about a hundred and eighty-five lean hard pounds. I didn’t know what Dud Philpot looked like then, but later I found out that he was in his early fifties and was about five-eleven and weighed about a hundred and forty-some bony-butt stooped-shouldered perpetually restless pounds.

I want you to know how much obliged I am to you for this you doing for me, Miss Boss Lady, Will Spradley said. I really do, he said, and I never will forget it as long as I live, he said, and she said, Which thanks to all this mess you now got us all in may not be all that long. And he said, Consarn the luck. I know it, Miss Boss Lady, and that’s what bothers me more than anything else and that’s exactly why I come all the way over here trying to warn Gile.

And Don’t think I don’t appreciate that either, she said, and
then she said, Look, I hate to be fussing at you like you ain’t already got troubles enough, Will Spradley, but goddamn man, there are white folks and there are white folks and you been around long enough to know what kind of white folks Dud Philpot is. Dud Philpot come from some of them old backwoods rosin-chewing razorback peckerwoods. Any fool ought to be able to see that, Will Spradley, she said, and then she said what she also said about knowing that class of white people once person-to-person. Because, if your folks and their folks have been knowing each other for a while, that made all the difference in the world and you turned each other favors and country folks to country folks regardless of being on different sides of the color line when you came into town.

But if you were just another one of us trying to transact business with one of them that you don’t know, they can excuse themselves for anything they do against you. From cheating to lynching. Because all they have to remember is that in spite of the fact that their white skin is supposed to put them above you, even the slaves back on the old plantations were better off than their so-called free but often raggedy-assed and half-starved and mostly despised foreparents.

You’re right, Miss Boss Lady, Will Spradley said. Cain’t nobody dispute that because here he comes jumping me like that after all them weeks and months I been meeting them time payments. You sure right because I feel like a fool for being surprised and now just look at all this trouble I might be causing all of us. That’s how come I’m trying to find Gile. Because it’s all my fault and I know it now and maybe it’s too late.

I was listening and trying to put the situation together as well as I could and as fast as I could, and at first the problem was that I thought that Will Spradley was somebody who worked at the club or maybe at the Pit and then I had thought maybe Will Spradley was in such a hurry to see Giles Cunningham because he
needed to borrow money to pay off an overdue debt to Dud Philpot, whoever Dud Philpot was, and then I realized that I had already become that much a part of something about which I didn’t yet really know anything at all.

I sure do hope Gile hurry up and get here because I got to see him and tell him, Will Spradley said, because I don’t want him thinking I’m like that because I know what people always subject to say and it ain’t fair because it ain’t true because I might be poor and sometimes I might have to take low and pick up what I can but I ain’t no white man’s nigger. I don’t care what nobody say. I ain’t never done nothing against my own.

He know Gile, Will Spradley went on talking as much to himself as to me and the Boss Lady. He got to know Gile. Everybody know Gile Cunningham, and everybody know Gile Cunningham ain’t never about to be giving in to no Dud Philpot, so then here he come buck-jumping at somebody like I’m the one when all I’m doing is standing around out there waiting for him so I can straighten up with him and get on about my business.

Then the three of us were just sitting there, waiting as if for the next weather report as you did when you were down on the Gulf Coast during hurricane season, and that was when Hortense Hightower asked him if he felt well enough to fill me in on what the situation had added up from. She said I was her young friend from the campus, and he said, Sure because I’m the onliest one that can tell it to you just exactly the way I got myself all tangled up in all this mess like this. Sure, because maybe you the kind of college boy that can see my point, like I’m counting on Gile doing. Because he the one I’m counting on. Sure, because most of these other folks ain’t no better than white folks.

But he didn’t begin at the beginning. He began at the point where he was coming along the railroad spur and was stopped by Giles Cunningham in a car being driven by Wiley Peyton, and as he went on talking and dabbing his nose and mouth with the face
towel that he kept dipping into the basin of water on the stool in front of him, he recounted everything, not only word for word but sometimes also thought for thought and almost breath for breath. So much so that it was not only as if you were an eye and ear witness but also the actual participant himself.

Maybe it was because I just couldn’t stop thinking about the music I had come to play on the phonograph that evening. Maybe so, maybe no. But as closely as I was following every detail of the story Will Spradley was retelling, not only for my benefit but also for his own, as soon as he started telling about it in his own way and at his own pace, it was also as if you were listening to an almost exact verbal parallel to one of the Ellington records that was near the very top of my list for that night. It was called “In a Jam,” but not because it was a song with lyrics about being in trouble. So far as I know, there never were any lyrics. The chances are that it was so named because it was an instrumental composition derived from the interplay of voices in a jam session.

And yet, of its very nature as a piece of music, “In a Jam” was also about being in a tight spot. A jam session, after all, is a musical battle royal, and as such it is always a matter of performing not only with hair-trigger inventiveness and ingenuity but also with free-flowing gracefulness which is to say elegance, not only under the pressure of the demands of the music itself but also in the presence of and in competition with your peers and betters.

All of which also added up to making the jam session a matter of antagonistic cooperation that enriched the overall rendition even as it required each instrumentalist to perform at the very highest level of his ability. Such, as every jazz initiate knows, is also precisely how the jam session also serves to expose the fact that there are times when the personal best of some musicians is none too good. Not that such is the basic function of the jam session by any means. Originally it was simply a matter of participating in a jamboree in celebration of something. Nor did anybody understand all of that more than
did Duke Ellington even back then the plaintive emphasis of whose score makes it all too obvious that in this instance he was more interested in the structure of the jam session as such than with what he was later to call the velocity of celebration.

In any case, it was as if Will Spradley’s plaintive voice, which already sounded so much like Tricky Sam Nanton’s plunger-muted trombone to begin with, was also by turns all of the hoarse ensemble shouts plus the sometimes tearful piano comps and fills of Duke Ellington himself as well as each solo instrument including the alto of Johnny Hodges, the clarinet of Barney Bigard, and so on through the call and response dialogue to the somewhat bugle/trumpet tattoo sound of Rex Stuart’s cornet out-chorus solo that you heard every time he made any mention of Giles Cunningham.

When he came to the point where he made his getaway through the back door of Dudley Philpot’s store, he stopped and just sat sighing and grunting and shaking his head and dabbing the cold towels to his nose and mouth again, and Hortense Hightower said, Man, goddamn. Man, look like you coulda done
something
to keep that bony butt son-of-a-bitch from kicking your ass like this. I swear to God, Will Spradley, I swear to God.

But all he would say then was, I just want Gile to hurry up and come on over here so I can tell him and explain my part to him because he the one all this is about and I don’t care what these old other folks think because they going to say what they going to say about me anyhow. They don’t want to know the truth. They just want to talk about somebody. But Gile is a businessman and he knows business is business and that’s the way he is and that’s what I like about him.

Well, just take it easy, she said. He’ll be here in a little while. Just as soon as he can, she said. But goddamn, she said to me then, can you believe all this stuff you just been hearing, Schoolboy? Myself, I know damn well it sure the hell is happening, but I’m still having a hard time
believing
it.

Y
ou could tell that Will Spradley didn’t really believe that it was really happening either. Even as he sat sighing and moaning and nursing his lacerations and closed eye, you could see that he was still expecting to wake up and find that all of the pain and breathless urgency was only a part of a very bad dream brought on by his worries about his money problems which, given just half a chance, he could explain his way out of for the time being.

But when Giles Cunningham finally made it there and filled us in on his part, you knew that he was not having any problem at all in believing in the consequences of what he had become caught up in several hours ago when Dud Philpot had come charging into the office out at the Pit, because all during the time he was talking to the three of us, he didn’t miss a step or even pause in the preparations that he was making for his next move.

That was when I found out what he had been doing while I was helping Hortense Hightower give first aid to Will Spradley. She had called him as soon as Will Spradley had showed up, saying
what he was saying, and he had clued in Speck Jenkins at the Pit, Wiley Peyton at the Dolomite, and Flea Mosley out at the Plum, and then he had headed over to Gin Mill Crossing to the poker game in Yancey William’s club room, because that was where he could find most of the help he was counting on, and when he pulled into the yard and saw the other cars he knew that most of the friends he was looking for were there already.

Big Bald Eagle Bob Webster opened the door and reached out to slap-snatch palms and stood grinning his ever-so-playful but ever-so-steady, bald-eagle-eyed, scar-cheeked grin at him with the others acknowledging his arrival without really looking up from the tobacco-cozy, corn whiskey cozy pomade-plus-aftershave, cozy hum-and-buzz at the green-felt-cushioned poker-round table.

Hell yeah, it’s him all right, Bald Eagle Bob Webster, whom some called Eag and others called Bar-E, said. Grady MacPherson, who was holding the deck, said, Yeah, come on in here, man, goddamn; and Eugene Glover said, Hey, goddamn right, come on in here. Hey, where you
been
, man? And Felton Carmichael said, Hey that’s all right about where the hell he been. Just bring your old late self on into this old chicken-butt house now, cousin.

He had stepped inside but he still stood where he was and waited with his hand up. The others, some sitting around the table as players, others hovering around, some only as onlookers and others waiting a turn—or the right moment—were Solomon Gatewood, Logan Scott, Eddie Rhodes, Curtis Howard, and Wendell Franklin, who said, Man, pull off your coat and money belt, and Logan Scott said, Hey, we been waiting for you, man.